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Comment by PradeetPatel | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely no financial incentive for businesses to take care of the environment. Unless there's a visible difference in short term monetary goals, attempting to sway the opinion of key stakeholders will always be a challenge.

We should never forget that the objective of any business is to make money for the shareholders, within legal (not necessarily ethical) constraints.

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Exactly. This is why human tribes were formed in the first place. To coordinate common interests. And from there, legal systems, governments and organized societies. And ultimately, the UN and international treaties.

Yet for climate, somehow it's about individual action or corporate goodwill.

No, same rules apply. We have to tolerate some unpleasantness now to avoid worse unpleasantness in the future. And this means nobody gets a free pass.

Ta not just businesses. Voters aren’t the least bit thrilled with saving the environment even in the so called greenest state CA 40% of emissions come from transportation and 5 lane highways are clogged to the brim with cars on 50 mile commutes with no housing built next to work despite miles and miles of open space and the governor wants to hand out 400$ gas cards to incentivize even more CO2 creation while people regularly take 200 mile trips to Lake Tahoe every month like it’s nothing. And these are people who consider themselves very environmental. You can’t make this stuff up

One environmentalist gave quite the vigorous impassioned speech on reducing CO2 gases. After 30min the reporter asked “so you must be quite in favor of carbon taxes, right”. To which she replied “oh no, that wouldn’t be equitable “. My jaw nearly dropped to the floor.

According to the long-dead Learned Hand. The objective of a business can be many things. If we can tolerate the societal change wrought by technology such as mobile phones and contraceptives, we can redefine the objectives of business.

> There is absolutely no financial incentive

Apart from the 1 trillion Euro Eoropean Green Deal

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal

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